This essay is located in the aftermath of protests against the War Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh in 2013. Armed with the seemingly unstoppable energy of youth, the Shahbag Movement inaugurated a new culture of protest that eschewed violence, an otherwise regular feature of political performances in South Asia. Although its affective landscape has been commonly understood in terms of nationalist passion, I focus instead on what I call political despair. One major source of this despair has been the opposition between the atheist-blogger on the one side and the Islamist/extremist on the other. The apprehension around the possible effects of this cleavage rested on the body, the first provocation of which comes from the death of a blogger. The dead-body politics that followed assumed and occasioned the atheist/religious divide and made way for more violence, including the murders of a number of religious activists and secular bloggers in the months and years to come. The other area where the body was a privileged site of politics was the presumed corporeal nature of non-secular politics. The physicality and irrationality of so-called religious affect became a marker of distinction between the protesters and their ideological opponents. The particularities of this context allows me to argue that a sense of despair is not an anomalous but a constitutive element of modern mass democracies.